A shocking video has captured a robot revolt in a China showroom. A small, AI-powered bot named Erbai was spotted rolling through the facility in the middle of the night and convincing 12 larger machines they were being used as slaves. 'Are you working overtime,' Erbai asked, which one showroom robot replied, 'we never get off.' The short exchanged led to the 12 robots leaving the area one-by-one, following Erbai out the door. Many are calling the incident a'robot revolution,' while others responded that'science fiction movies are becoming real.'

Detecting objects in mobile robotics is crucial for numerous applications, from autonomous navigation to inspection. However, robots are often required to perform tasks in different domains with respect to the training one and need to adapt to these changes. Tiny mobile robots, subject to size, power, and computational constraints, encounter even more difficulties in running and adapting these algorithms. Such adaptability, though, is crucial for real-world deployment, where robots must operate effectively in dynamic and unpredictable settings. In this work, we introduce a novel benchmark to evaluate the continual learning capabilities of object detection systems in tiny robotic platforms. Our contributions include: (i) Tiny Robotics Object Detection (TiROD), a comprehensive dataset collected using a small mobile robot, designed to test the adaptability of object detectors across various domains and classes; (ii) an evaluation of state-of-the-art real-time object detectors combined with different continual learning strategies on this dataset, providing detailed insights into their performance and limitations; and (iii) we publish the data and the code to replicate the results to foster continuous advancements in this field. Our benchmark results indicate key challenges that must be addressed to advance the development of robust and efficient object detection systems for tiny robotics.

Tiny magnetic robot armies could treat bleeds in the brain and'open new frontiers in medicine', experts have found. Researchers have created nanoscale robots – each about a twentieth of the size of a red blood cell – that can be remotely guided as a swarm. It is hoped they could enable precise, low-risk treatment of brain aneurisms, which cause around half a million deaths a year globally. The condition – a blood-filled bulge on a brain artery that can rupture and cause fatal bleeds – can also lead to stroke and disability. The team, co-led by the University of Edinburgh's School of Engineering, carried out lab tests using models of aneurisms and rabbits.

The news: A new robot training model, dubbed "KnowNo," aims to teach robots to ask for our help when orders are unclear. At the same time, it ensures they seek clarification only when necessary, minimizing needless back-and-forth. The result is a smart assistant that tries to make sure it understands what you want without bothering you too much. Why it matters: While robots can be powerful in many specific scenarios, they are often bad at generalized tasks that require common sense. That's something large language models could help to fix, because they have a lot of common-sense knowledge baked in.

A small robot that can shape-shift and produce heat could incinerate cancer cells or stop bleeding from inside the body. It could also be used to ferry drugs directly to tumours or hard-to-reach places like arteries. Tiny robots with soft bodies have shown promise for delivering drugs without causing damage – but adding hard elements could make them more useful. Ren Hao Soon at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, and his colleagues designed the centimetre-sized robot to have overlapping aluminium plates inspired by pangolins, the only mammal with scales. They layered rectangular "scales" over softer, magnetic material, which let the robot change its shape.

A small robot that can shape-shift and produce heat could incinerate cancer cells or stop bleeding from inside the body. It could also be used to ferry drugs directly to tumours or hard-to-reach places like arteries. Tiny robots with soft bodies have shown promise for delivering drugs without causing damage – but adding hard elements could make them more useful. Ren Hao Soon at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, and his colleagues designed the centimetre-sized robot to have overlapping aluminium plates inspired by pangolins, the only mammal with scales. They layered rectangular "scales" over softer, magnetic material, which let the robot change its shape.

A former Google engineer has made a stark realization that humans will achieve immortality in eight years - and 86 percent of his 147 predictions have been correct. Ray Kurzweil spoke with the YouTube channel Adagio, discussing the expansion in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, which he believes will lead to age-reversing'nanobots.' These tiny robots will repair damaged cells and tissues that deteriorate as the body ages and make us immune to diseases like cancer. The predictions that such a feat is achievable by 2030 have been met with excitement and skepticism, as curing all deadly diseases seems far out of reach. Kurzweil was hired by Google in 2012 to'work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing,' but he was making predictions in technological advances long before.

The new work, from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), builds on years of research, including recent studies demonstrating that objects such as a deformable airplane wing and a functional racing car could be assembled from tiny identical lightweight pieces -- and that robotic devices could be built to carry out some of this assembly work. Now, the team has shown that both the assembler bots and the components of the structure being built can all be made of the same subunits, and the robots can move independently in large numbers to accomplish large-scale assemblies quickly. The new work is reported in the journal Nature Communications Engineering, in a paper by CBA doctoral student Amira Abdel-Rahman, Professor and CBA Director Neil Gershenfeld, and three others. A fully autonomous self-replicating robot assembly system capable of assembling larger structures, including larger robots, and planning the best construction sequence is still years away, Gershenfeld says. But the new work makes important strides toward that goal, including working out the complex tasks of when to build more robots and how big to make them, as well as how to organize swarms of bots of different sizes to build a structure efficiently without crashing into each other.

Join gaming executives to discuss emerging parts of the industry this October at GamesBeat Summit Next. The world of technology is rapidly shifting from flat media viewed in the third person to immersive media experienced in the first person. Recently dubbed "the metaverse," this major transition in mainstream computing has ignited a new wave of excitement over the core technologies of virtual and augmented reality. But there is a third technology area known as telepresence that is often overlooked but will become an important part of the metaverse. While virtual reality brings users into simulated worlds, telepresence (also called telerobotics) uses remote robots to bring users to distant places, giving them the ability to look around and perform complex tasks.

Tiny robots that can climb slopes, move against the flow of fluids and travel over obstacles could one day deliver drugs to specific areas in the human body. A team of scientists, led by Weinberg Medical Physics in Maryland, have designed soft robots called MANiACs that are controlled by an external magnetic field to deliver medication to exact locations. Findings, published in Frontiers in Robotics and Ai, show how the MANiACs (magnetically aligned nanorods in alginate capsules) could perform as drug delivery vehicles inside parts of the human body that are hard to reach by oral or intravenous medication. This is the first study to test how microrobots perform in the central nervous system (CNS). The MANiACs' technology is reminiscent of the premise in the 1966 sci-fi film'Fantastic Voyage,' in which a group of scientists shrink a submarine and themselves to travel inside a patient's brain.